The Equation Group's sourcecode is totally fugly

For me, the other kind are much more common! :wink:

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The NSA may have learned their lesson regarding leaking production-worthy code. Stuxnet was disassembled and the bad guys figured out how to replicate what was done. (GAUSS showed that they learned how to avoid repeating that mistake.) In this case the NSA is shipping BANANAGLEE code all over the world, placing it in the hands of everyone from anti-virus researchers to hackers, criminals, and terrorists. There’s no reason to deliver a high quality weapon into the big bad world. Something fragile and hard to repurpose is actually better for them.

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I wish I knew.

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I assume you mean 2 pass ROT13.

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I’m not sure I’ve ever forgotten that I wrote something, and I tend to comment the heck out of my code. More likely for me in that positive situation would be: “Wow. How did I come up with that?”

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wouldn’t it be fantastic if our older and younger selves could arrange a meetup and exchange advice/information? So many possibilities…

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I use the same patterns over and over. If you read code I’ve written it is verbose enough to not need excessive comments; compiler friendly so it is fast; and uses primitives like noones business.

Shortcut code pisses me off. No, I really, really don’t want to learn how your iterator method works, or why you order your hash tables via Window-1561 encoding as opposed to utf-16.

Deep breath

I need a back massage, some aroma therapy, and enya stat.

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So you’re saying your code is lovely, it has a “hand” to it that could be readily identified, and yet you forget it’s your code?

Not sure I ever said I excessively comment either. Good luck on that spa treatment.

:wink:

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I never said code I wrote didn’t have a portrait of itself in the attic.

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maybe “fugly” but it does the job it was built to do. THAT is, or should be, the measure. Not too surprising an academic would be offended by the code

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Great point; unless BANANAGLEE (real life is often so much more rediculous than fiction; in James Bond all programs have some super cool codename, like DOOMSLAYER) was written by Shadow Brokers who are trying to pass it off as NSA to boost their own profile.

Spies, eh, what are like?

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We’re talking sex, right?

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So if this code is surprisingly bad, maybe the whole package is a honeypot kind of thing?

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Scientist variant: “I need a citation for this claim, which researcher was it that figured that out? Hang on…that was me? Cool…”

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Chesterton’s anti-Semitism annoys me a lot, but I keep telling myself it was the bad influence of Belloc. However, The Flying Inn, his account of an attempt at an Islamist takeover of England (led, of course, by a member of the British upper classes, though wildly overstated, has some points that might seem a bit prophetic. Occasionally conspiracy detectors turn out to be right (e.g. the Black Hand in Serbia really did infiltrate the government.)

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(previously, considered to be one of the leaders of contemporary security research.

anyone else find it hilarious that corey is criticizing someone’s code as he leaves a dangling parenthesis?

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“Bad Code” is anything you wrote, or anything I wrote more than 2 weeks ago.

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Fugly code that quite often works.

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We’re adopting Equation Group coding standards here. Bras without kets, incorrect comments. Good enough for gummint good enough for me.

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